It's a far cry from an Orange County economic upswing of another era – the mid-1990s – when it seemed that everybody was opening steakhouses. Today, the burger joint is likely the hot new place at your neighborhood shopping center.

That change in entrée tells you a lot about today's solid but unspectacular recovery from the Great Recession. One of the signature trends of this rebound is a continued level of thriftiness, witnessed everywhere from overly conservative corporate spending to almost equally stingy household budgets.

Bargain-oriented mentalities show up in several ways in the latest slicing of my Big Orange Index, a proprietary compilation of three dozen benchmarks for the local economy. In the spring, the Big O showed another steady advance. The broad Big O Index is on a three-year winning streak, though the spring quarter's advance was slower than the advance in the previous two quarters.

The best news is that the most recent economic growth was widespread, as all six of the Big O's sub-indexes rose, from winter to spring – the first full participation in the recovery by my key economic markers since the spring of 2011.

Yes, Orange County real estate had another huge pop. And my Boss Index hints that business leaders finally might be ending their tight-fisted ways.

But to my eye, the most remarkable players are local restaurants and other merchants, who by the Big O's math are enjoying three full years of advancement. Did you know there are a record number of restaurant workers in Orange County today? It's a critical story line for the current economy.

Overall retail employment has crept higher in Orange County in recent years – up 5 percent since the bottom of early 2010, when store owners made their final big cuts after what was a dismal holiday season.

Even with the recent hiring spurt, Orange County's overall retail job count has only recovered roughly half of what was lost during the recession. Pressures from online merchants will undoubtedly keep a lid on overall employment at local brick-and-mortar merchants of goods.

RESTAURANT BOOM

Jobs at local restaurants account for 45 percent of retail-oriented workers in Orange County, up from 37 percent two decades ago. Restaurant employment is up 8 percent in three years, to an all-time high of 119,000 positions of the county's overall 1.4 million jobs.

It's just one reason for the Big O Merchants Index's winning streak.

Local retailers as a group have been greatly helped by more paychecks, if not the occasional raise being handed out, as employment rebounds. Chapman University estimated Orange County incomes have grown by 10 percent in three years. Certainly, there's fresh cash in local wallets.

And consumers are more willing to spend. Two measures of local shopping – Chapman's estimate of taxable sales and Orange County Transportation Agency's Authority's count of its sales tax revenues – show growing sales on a year-over-year basis for three years.

All is not rosy. It's not easy running a local retail outfit. Orange County shopkeepers have survived by squeezing out thin profits with measured growth and cost containments in an age when shoppers are spending, but with purpose.

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